About Us
Our Story
We launched the Day One Project in Fall 2019 as a new kind of platform for policy entrepreneurship, with the goal of building a movement to change “policy” from a noun to a verb.
In 2019, our goal was to arm the next presidential administration in January 2020 with 100 implementation-ready policy proposals crowdsourced from the science, technology and innovation community.
Not only was our call for ideas met with an overwhelming response, but along the way we honed a vision for policy entrepreneurship: how anyone can convert a merely promising idea into real movement.
Our vision is to change the world through policy entrepreneurship:
- We approach policymakers as the customer: Policymakers are busy, so we strive to provide detailed, tailored, and focused plans of action on how an important idea could be implemented.
- We’re committed to democratizing the policy process. Many of the best ideas come from somewhere else, yet issue experts and new voices alike are rarely asked to contribute or aware of opportunities to serve.
- We organize around key opportunities for change: Policy change has its own calendar, and we prepare ideas to meet the moment — as well as staff their implementation.
We pursue this work by providing the tools and support for anyone with a promising idea to contribute and by fostering opportunities for talented individuals to engage in public service.
Impact to Date
Since 2020, we have helped a growing community of contributors develop promising policy ideas — an amazing number of which have already become policy. Together we have inspired:
- Over $2.6 billion in federal investment across key science and technology priorities
- Eight new cross-cutting federal initiatives
- Four executive actions
Our Talent Hub’s Impact Fellowship has provided pathways for nearly 25 diverse technical experts to engage in public service in high-impact roles at more than a dozen federal institutions. And another 40+ members of our network are serving in government in a wide variety of roles.